Other Types
Besides these two types of PCD, other pathways have been discovered. Called "non-apoptotic programmed cell-death" (or "caspase-independent programmed cell-death" or "necroptosis"), these alternative routes to death are as efficient as apoptosis and can function as either backup mechanisms or the main type of PCD.
Other forms of programmed cell death include anoikis, almost identical to apoptosis except in its induction; cornification, a form of cell death exclusive to the eyes; excitotoxicity and Wallerian degeneration.
Plant cells undergo particular processes of PCD similar to autophagic cell death. However, some common features of PCD are highly conserved in both plants and metazoa.
Read more about this topic: Programmed Cell Death
Famous quotes containing the word types:
“... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)